Why Don’t Health Insurers Promote a Healthier Diet?

Why don’t more big payors in health care embrace plant-based eating?

Many of the diseases “that cause a constant drain on health care budgets can be prevented by nutrition;” so, why aren’t the big payors getting involved? Even a 1% decline in excess body fat could alone save tens of billions in medical costs. You’d think at least the health insurance industry would try to get people to eat more healthfully to try to pay out less money. Well, one could say “the insurance industry benefits from high health care costs because these rising costs are simply passed on to both individuals and employers in terms of higher premiums and insurers take a fixed percentage of these premiums as increasing profits.” They get a piece of the pie; so, the bigger the pie—the unhealthier everyone is—the bigger their piece. “As such, insurers have not done as much as they could to help reduce health care costs because lower costs would hurt their bottom line.”

Could you imagine “there was a medication that could successfully treat and even reverse heart disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and many other chronic conditions without any negative side effects and offered the promise of dramatically reduced health care costs”? Imagine all the advertising that would be needed to promote it. Imagine how much drug companies would charge for a pill that could not just treat but cure diabetes and these other diseases? “Then what if you were told this medication exists today, is available to everyone in unlimited quantities at a low cost, but the vast majority of the American public has never heard about it.” You want a solution to significantly reduce health care costs? “The solution is to use food as medical treatment,” specifically, foods made from minimally processed plants, as shown below and at 1:58 in my video Why Don’t Health Insurers Encourage Healthier Eating?.

“One of the main barriers is simply the current widespread belief that once someone has a chronic condition, such as heart disease or type 2 diabetes, there is very little that can be done to actually reverse the disease and the best outcome possible is to maintain the condition so that it does not get any worse. The fact that a whole food plant-based approach provides a safe, effective, low-cost alternative to eliminate symptoms and potentially reverse the underlying condition without drugs or surgery is unknown to a vast majority of Americans. In contrast to the pharmaceutical industry that spends large sums to market new drugs…there are not big profits in promoting a plant-based diet.”

The politics surrounding health care are focused on who’s going to pay for it instead of what kind of health care is best. “The evidence is overwhelming that a whole food plant-based diet provides the best opportunity to not only reduce the growth in spending, but actually decrease total health care costs more than any drug, medical procedure, insurance reform, or provider payment model could hope to.”

Thankfully, the word is spreading. A review of the evidence published in Kaiser Permanente’s journal concluded that doctors “should consider recommending a plant-based diet to all their patients, especially those with high blood pressure, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, or obesity.” Kaiser has followed up with user friendly guides (freely available online) for both physicians and patients explaining the benefits and practical aspects of implementing a plant-based diet,” as you can see below and at 3:24 in my video.

So, why aren’t all insurers sending out such information to all their members? Drug ads routinely tell viewers, “Ask your doctor if this drug is right for you.” Well, members could be prompted to ask their doctors about a plant-based diet’s ability to reverse disease and reduce or eliminate prescription drug use. “Of course these materials would also have to list all side effects such as increased energy, lower blood pressure, and improved digestion, all while eating unlimited quantities of satisfying food.” Ask your doctor if plants are right for you.

Doctor’s Note

For more on treating the underlying cause of lifestyle diseases, see:

Lifestyle Medicine: Treating the Causes of Disease
Convincing Doctors to Embrace Lifestyle Medicine
What Diet Should Physicians Recommend?
The Actual Benefit of Diet vs. Drugs

For health in the workplace, check out A Workplace Wellness Program That Works.